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Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Mille Feuilles: Puff pastry with French cream and a topping of powdered sugar! Is there a more perfect combination?

I found in this recipe in the Cake Boss's book. (I plan of trying out all his recipes! There's a 100 of them =D ) But he calls these Napoleons. The only difference is the topping. I used powdered sugar, whereas his had icing on top.

My family has been asking for this dessert for a long time now, and I've always been afraid of how the puff pastry will turn out. It's a bit hard to control, but once you know how to work with it, you'll get the results you want.

Anyway, I made this dessert by following these steps:

1. I baked two rectangle puff pastry sheets.

Photo Credit: Diana Loutfy

2. In order to make French Cream, I mixed both Italian Custard Cream with Whipped Cream. Whipped Cream is simply 1 cup Whipping cream to 1/4 cup sugar whipped until thick. The Custard is bit more complicated but the basic idea is that you should simmer some milk with vanilla essence on medium low heat. In a separate bowl, whip up egg yolks, sugar and cake flour. Then mix both together until thick. After taking of beat, you add a LITTLE bit of butter and refrigerate. (I'll make a more detailed recipe soon and add it to the index :) )
3. You cut up the puff pastry and assemble!
4. Sprinkle some powdered sugar on top.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

I realized from working with cakes, that I'm going to have to learn about A LOT of different things: from flowers, to people to cars!! It's really amazing work!

Back to this cake:

This cake is an old red mini cooper! I know: mini coopers are smaller than this, but well I really just couldn't cut out all that cake!! At the end, it's all about the cake, no?

Well this was pretty challenging! I baked two LARGE cakes, stacked them up, froze them then started carving. I had like 10 pictures of cars in front me while I did this. After I got the shape I wanted, I frosted it, put it back in the freezer then covered it with: yes you guessed it: marshmallow fondant =D

The details were pretty fun to make, the license plate, the lights, bumpers etc.

Oh for the windows, I just covered the cake with some white fondant first then with the red. Then cut up the windows from the red fondant and voila! Windows =D

Monday, February 13, 2012

The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.

But well, there's no harm in trying right? :P

and what is better and more beautiful than a cake?!

This year, I decided to go for something a bit out of the ordinary.

I just love snoopy! He's very special to me, and I find him the cutest thing ever =) and during this time of year, I thought I'd use this to try and bring some smiles to peoples' faces.

Snoopy (K)
Photo Credit: Diana Loutfy

I saw a similar cake while looking at some awesome cake designs and directly knew I wanted to make this for Valentine's.

Be my Valentine!
Photo Credit: Diana Loutfy

The red house works perfectly with all the hearts, don't you think?

Photo Credit: Diana Loutfy

Now the house wasn't very easy to make :P But I put my mind to it and was able to! I had to build it from some cardboard (I had no cardboard, so I used an empty Ghandour biscuit box) and then wrap it with red fondant. Snoopy was just the cutest thing to make (and surprisingly the easiest!) I just used some white marshmallow fondant and rolled them into balls, shaped them up a bit then stuck them together. I crafted Woodstock, the yellow bird using (yes!) some more fondant and placed a cute little heart on top.

And whats says "I love you" more than a heart?! I tried to put as many hearts as possible on it!
You see, I always say: If you make a cake and you're all happy and full of love, the end result would be great! That's the secret =D

This cake was no exception. I went into a frenzy of hearts and red and cuteness! All I could see for two days was hearts and mushy stuff :P I just love this cake and am so proud of it!

I just hope that this day is full of happiness and love! I wish everyone would find that special someone to enjoy this day (and every day) with and be as happy as I am.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

This is the second cake I made today! It's for my mom's birthday! I had to make some very special, you see I love my mom very much (and she is always the one helping me with my other cakes:P) So this was a challenge for me: Mom wasn't helping!!!

Well, as I mentioned in my other post, mom's cake last year was a chocolate log shaped cake with a couple of roses.
So this year I had to go BIG!!

I saw this beautiful cake some time ago and immediately knew this was the cake for mom. She loves roses! and anything red.

The roses took a long time! I had some help from my friend Dana and my sister Lana!! It was very fun making them, no? :P

Then I cut up some light and dark green stripes and make a border around the cake.
This was one the most time-consuming cakes I've done, but it was worth it! I loved the result!

Isn't it pretty???

OH OH, the cake is a delicious lemon cake. It's made up of 4 layers of vanilla cake filled with lemon filling and frosting. Everyone loved it!!!

Happy Birthday Mom!!!

Thank you for everything you've done! I couldn't have done anything without you!!

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Today is a very special day! It's my sister's and my mom's birthday =D It also happens to be the "anniversary" of the first fondant cakes I made. (Yes, they were both for my mom and sister). My first two cakes were very simple (and not all that great:P) They were a log shaped chocolate cake with some flowers on top (for mom) and a rectangle shaped cake with a fondant flat apple logo on top!

SO, this year, I decided I should redeem my self for those cakes =D

Sally (my sister) LOVES coffee! and she LOVES her iPhone!

So I remembered this cake I tried a while ago that she loved. It's called Opera Cake.

Its 7 layers of a coffee-lovers dream! It's made up Jaconde - which is simple an almond sponge cake - soaked in coffee syrup, coffee buttercream, ganache and covered with a dark chocolate glaze.

Now that the coffee part was done, I had to get some iPhone into it.

A while ago, someone sent me a picture of some iPhone apps cupcakes. They were gorgeous! and Sally loved them.